8 Dumbest Lawsuits In The History Of The Music Industry

8. LimeWire Sued For $75 Trillion

LimeWire was one of the many popular peer-to-peer file-sharing services in the early part of the millennium. And, much like contemporaries Napster and Kazaa, would find itself in a whole butt ton of legal troubles. The Recording Industry Association of America wanted to penalize the company for their participation as a cog in the free music machine. And so they whipped out their calculators, determined a sufficient figure to represent the funds lost by the artists because of this service, and then they hit multiply, the number 1, and let their finger rest on the 0 button until they'd finished reading A Tale of Two Cities. Whereas a previous lawsuit against Napster sought the handsome sum of 20 billion, this time the RIAA came to a thoughtful decision to go absolutely insane and demanded LimeWire pay 75 TRILLION dollars, or more money than is available in the free world. Naturally, the judge said "this seems a bit harsh" and proceeded to drop the total possible damages to a few billion dollars. Still, that's a lot of dough to cough up just because a bunch of 13-year-olds didn't want to pay for their copies of Creed's My Own Prison. Luckily, a jury of peers ultimately ruled the then-defunct service should pay an amount that doesn't sound like a Bond villain's ransom, and settled the bill for $105 million.